In ancient China, the Taoists were the scientists (see
Needham's classic Science and
Civilization in China, vol 2). And the scientist-Taoists were not
"religious" in anything like the Western sense. To them we owe
ceramics, much of metallurgy, the alchemy that led to gunpowder and
herbal medicine, decimal arithmetic, etc., etc., etc. I keep stressing
this point in my posts, because the same respect that the Saturn theory
accords to ancient peoples for describing real phenomena in their myths
must be granted to their scientific and technological accomplishments.
The Taoists were notoriously open-minded, and only later when
post-Confucian orthodoxy came to power in China were the Taoists (and
other free-thinkers) crushed out.

But we must look at China the way Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz did from
Europe, together with the Jesuit missionaries in China, in the late seventeenth
and
early eighteenth centuries. The Jesuits, beginning with the
extraordinary
Matteo Ricci in the late sixteenth century, had gone to China armed with
the
fruits of the Golden Renaissance--maps, astronomical and musical
instruments, paintings using the science of perspective, etc. They
discovered not a primitive nation, but a nation already well advanced in
most areas of science and technology--in some cases more advanced than
Europe. They found an exceptionally learned population, generally open
to
the scientific and moral ideas of the Renaissance. They also found 160
million people, one-fourth of the world's population, with a population
density of nearly 40 per square kilometer, almost twice that of Europe,
with
a higher average standard of living and a greater literacy rate.

To Leibniz, this population density proved something: It proved that
that
society had mastered to a significant degree the fundamental laws of
nature.
This was proof that they knew God--not perfectly, of course, but to a
degree
that made possible the sustained expansion of the unfolding creation.
Leibniz studied the Confucian classics, using the translations he
received
from his Jesuit correspondents, based on the assumption that a
fundamental
understanding of man's role as imago viva Dei, in the living image of
God,
must be imbedded in their philosophy, as proven by their advanced
culture,
and the high population density. The purpose was not to gratuitously
gloss
over shortcomings or errors, nor to propitiate the Chinese (as the
Jesuits
were repeatedly accused of doing), but to scientifically discover the
cause,
in their ideas, of the development of Chinese civilization, in the only
place such a cause could be found--in the coherence of the ideas guiding
their culture with the laws of the universe.

The problem in China today is not overpopulation, but that the nation
has
been subjected to 150 years of British opium, British imperial looting,
foreign wars, civil wars, and 44 years of Maoist lunacy. The result is
the
destruction of the infrastructure and education, which renders the
existing
economy incapable of sustaining the population. The International
Monetary
Fund and Deng Xiaoping's reformers plan to ``solve'' this problem by
mass
forced abortions, and by grinding up the so-called surplus labor in
Auschwitz-style free trade zones. We're looking at the potential for
another
holocaust, caused by the same forces that have caused several holocausts
in
China's history.

To reverse this, we must first ask: What caused the population growth
in the
first place?

Confucius (d. 479 B.C.) compiled what was called the Five Classics,
which
were a compilation of the oral and written tradition of Chinese
antiquity
together with his own contributions.

The ``Golden Age'' of which Confucius writes covers the era of
approximately
2500 B.C. to 1000 B.C. In fact, there can be no doubt about the
existence of
an advanced civilization in that era, since astronomical proof exists
within
the classics themselves. Nineteenth-century European scholars and
astronomers, using a passage from one of the five classics, the Book of
History, which specifies the meridian passage of a series of stars at
the
summer solstice, used the procession of the equinox to prove that the
measurement took place precisely in the year 2357 B.C. Another reference
to
a specific constellation's relation to the ecliptic at the summer
solstice
was shown to almost certainly have been recorded in the sixteenth
millennium
before Christ. In fact, it is extensively recorded in historical records
that each of the early dynasties established their authority on the
basis of
their astronomical discoveries and their construction of solar
calendars.

Let me show how this tradition is reflected in the classics. In the
Analects, the collection of Confucius's own teachings, the master is
asked
by his disciples where they can turn for guidance when he dies. He
responds:

Look to the Heavens. What do they say?
Do the seasons not run their appointed courses
And all things proceed according to their nature?
Look to the Heavens. What do they say?

The poetry classic, or Book of Poetry,
contains the following poem on the
intelligibility of the Creation, and on the source of human virtue being
located in the quest for mastering that lawfulness:

Heaven, in creating mankind,
Created all things according to law,
Such that people can grasp this law,
And will love virtue.

Confucius identified a concept called, in Chinese, jen, as the
fundamental
principle of God's creation and of man's essence as he reflects that
creation. Jen is often translated as ``love,'' or ``benevolence,'' or
``humaneness'' in English, and throughout history the Chinese debated
the
real meaning of jen along similar lines. It is clear, however, both in
Confucius and especially in the work of Mencius--the greatest follower
of
Confucius, who died in 289 B.C., about 200 years after Confucius--the
divine
love of God for his creation, and the higher form of human love made
possible through joining the emotions and the intellect; a love of God,
of
truth, of beauty, and of mankind as a whole. This is the ``love of
virtue,''
which derives from accepting God's love through ``grasping'' his laws
and
mastering the lawfulness that governs the physical universe.

Mencius extended this concept to assert that man is born fundamentally
good,
in precisely the same way that Plato did.

Mencius argued that jen, and the other fundamental
virtues--righteousness,
propriety and wisdom--are not imposed on man from outside, but are born
within him. All men are equal in precisely this respect, that they have
the
same potential for good, to participate in the continuing creation. That
men
differ from one another in respect to these virtues is simply due to
their
failure to carry out their potential.

To Confucius and Mencius, the primary responsibility of those who
properly
develop their inborn powers, is to apply those powers to the development
of
the nation, what we think of as physical and political economy. Even the
Emperor, although known as the Son of Heaven, was not above this
natural-law
responsibility. In the famous passage from the end of the Analects,
Confucius quotes Emperor Yao, who, near death, says to his successor
Emperor
Shun: ``The God-ordained order of succession now rests upon thy person.
Hold
fast with the heart and soul to the true middle course of the right. If
there should be distress and want among the people within the Empire,
the
mandate of Heaven shall be taken away from you forever.''

Mencius extends this ``Mandate of Heaven'' to every political leader. He
says that there is no difference between killing a man with a sword and
killing him with the style of government. In a passage that has an eerie
familiarity to today's moral collapse and the corruption in the judicial
system, as I see clearly here every day, Mencius says:

``They are only men of education who, without a dependable livelihood,
are
still able to maintain a fixed heart. As to the people, if they have not
a
dependable livelihood, it follows that they will not have a fixed heart.
And
if they have not a fixed heart, there is nothing which they will not do
in
the way of self-abandonment, or moral deflection, of depravity, and of
wild
license. When they thus have been involved in crime, to then follow them
up
and to punish them--this is to entrap the people. How can such a thing
as
``entrapping the people'' be done under the rule of a benevolent man?''

A prince is not a man of privilege, but a man of responsibility to
Heaven.
He is called upon to lead through the example of his own virtue, not
through
arbitrary power.

So, this is the historical process that gave rise to a population of
over 25
million by the time of Confucius, which then more than doubled over the
next
400 years. There are obvious parallels with Christian teaching. In fact,
a
fundamental teaching of Confucius was the Golden Rule. Nicolaus of Cusa,
whose work generated the Golden Renaissance in Italy in the fifteenth
century, in his essay ``On the Peace of Faith,'' made reference to the
Golden Rule, and to the commandment to love God, when he said:

``The divine commandments are very brief and are all well known and
common
in every nation, for the light that reveals them to us is created along
with
the rational mind.''

In the same way, Leibniz, in studying Confucianism and especially the
Confucian Renaissance masters of the eleventh and twelfth centuries,
whom
I'll discuss later, said this about their teaching:
``To offend Heaven is to act against reason; to ask pardon of Heaven is
to
reform oneself and to make a sincere return in work and deed in the
submission one owes to this very law of reason. For me, I find this all
quite excellent and quite in accord with natural theology.... Only by
strained interpretation and interpolation could one find anything to
criticize on this point. It is pure Christianity, insofar as it renews
the
natural law inscribed in our hearts, except for what revelation and
grace
add to it to improve our nature.''

I want to mention two contemporary views on the comparison of
Confucianism
with Judeo-Christian theology, both of which, I believe, are insightful.
The
first is that of Bishop Chang, the retired Bishop of Taiwan, who
recently
met with Leni Rubinstein in Taiwan and presented her with a recent
translation of his book from the 1970s. Bishop Chang, writing for his
parishioners, tells the Chinese not to feel slighted that God did not
choose
their race for the incarnation. After all, he said, if His son was to be
born a man, he had to be born into a family, and the choice of the
Semites
was as good as any other choice, since the gift was for all mankind
anyway.
Besides, he had to prepare the people for this event, which is why he
revealed himself to Abraham and Moses, and created the Jewish religion,
allowing hundreds of years of the knowledge of the one God amongst the
Jews,
in order to prepare the way. The Jewish knowledge of God was based
primarily
on the law, Mosaic law, which instilled the fear of God in man, but,
said
Bishop Chang, lacked the sense of the all-pervasive love which was the
message of Christ, to love one another, even one's enemies.
But lo! says the Bishop, this Christian love is really the same as the
jen
of Confucius--so we Chinese should be very proud that God revealed this
beautiful truth to us 500 years before he did in the West! He adds,
however,
that the Confucians did not fully comprehend jen, since the notion of
justice in Confucianism included returning an act of injustice with an
act
of justice, but did not go so far as to return injustice with kindness,
or
love.

The second reference is to the work of Prof. William Theodore de Bary of
Columbia University, one of the few decent scholars I've found among
those
in the massive ``Confucian Revival'' taking place since the death of
Mao.
Professor de Bary points to the Hebrew Covenant with God, which has no
parallel in Confucianism except, to a limited extent, in the Mandate of
Heaven. This Mandate, however, was for the Emperor only, while the
Covenant
was for all Jews. The Covenant, he says, was not a privilege to do what
one
will as a ``chosen race,'' but was in fact a heavy responsibility placed
upon each and every Jew to follow God. This personal accountability for
all
people is, says Professor de Bary, lacking in Confucianism. The ruler,
the
minister and the sage are given a heavy burden by Heaven, which is
uncompromising, but such responsibility is seldom placed on the common
people. When the people are in trouble, the leaders are to blame. There
is a
lack of someone like Lyn, or a good Baptist minister who is both
fearless
before corrupt officials, but who also places the full weight of
responsibility on the common man who tolerates the corruption in the
leadership in order to preserve his own corruption and his own inaction.

This is not a small point. The lack of a sense of personal
responsibility
for the world as a whole leads to pragmatism. With a pragmatist's view
of
the world, where truth becomes secondary to convenience or immediate
gain,
creative activity is virtually impossible, since truth is no longer the
goal, and one, therefore, either slowly or more rapidly descends to the
level of a beast.

Confucius was critically aware of this problem of pragmatism. In the
very
first dialogue of the Mencius, a prince asks Mencius what he has to
offer
him that will profit his reign. Confucius denounces him for being
concerned
only with immediate profit rather than truth.

Chu Hsi, in the twelfth century, recognized the source of the problem,
and
essentially solved it. He extended the concept of the ``Mandate of
Heaven''
to all citizens--thus insisting that we must each of us, answer to God
for
the state of our society, even though we may not be officials.

Dr. Sun Yat Sen, the founder of the Chinese Republic in 1911 and one of
the
great leaders and thinkers of our century, focused precisely on this
problem
of pragmatism as the most profound problem in the Chinese people
throughout
history. His book on the psychology of the Chinese, known in the West as
his
Autobiography, identifies the ancient Chinese adage that ``knowledge is
easy, action is difficult,'' as the root of virtually every crisis in
Chinese history. Sun insists that the opposite is the case: that
knowledge
is primary, and action is self-evident when knowledge is complete.

John Dewey, when he travelled to China at the beginning of this century,
latched onto this pragmatism as a lever in his project to undermine
Confucianism. It is a problem which still plagues China today, both
among
the Democracy Movement and among the scientists and other official
circles.

Before I discuss Chu Hsi and the Confucian Renaissance, let's look at
the
other side.

Opposition to Confucianism took two forms. The second of these two was a
tyrannical political movement called Legalism, which I'll discuss in a
moment. The first form was the sponsorship of the mystical gobbledygook
called Taoism. Lao Tze, the founder of Taoism, a contemporary of
Confucius,
insisted that since knowledge of the infinite, of the True Path, or the
Tao,
is impossible, and what we do is meaningless in regard to the ultimate
course of the Tao, therefore we will be in tune with the Tao if we do
absolutely nothing. Says Lao Tze: ``Do nothing, and all things will be
done.
I do nothing and my people become good of their own accord. Abandon
wisdom
and discard knowledge, and the people will be benefitted a
hundredfold.''

So, you see, Adam Smith was a Taoist. The ``invisible hand'' is a Taoist
plot, and Maggie Thatcher a Taoist priestess. Not surprisingly, the
British
have recently launched a virtual Taoist revival in their press. The
Guardian
last month ran an article by a philosophy professor with the extremely
unfortunate name of Ray Billington, who argues that the world has now
proven
itself to be Hobbesian, with everyone following their greed and lust to
the
extreme, and the way to ``come to terms'' with this, to accept it, is to
turn to Taoism, ``the basic way or flow of the world.'' This will
provide
``a deeper sense of being..., to know that the age-old distinction
between
divine and human ... is false.'' Now you know what governs Mr. Death,
David
Owen. He believes he is God.

The primary theoretician of Taoism was Chuang Tze, who lived sometime in
the
fourth and third centuries B.C. His book, beloved by cultists, mystics,
and
British oligarchs today, is an assault on Confucianism, and especially
on
the Confucian call for ``charity and duty to one's neighbor,'' which
Chuang
Tze ridiculed as destructive to the Tao.

He argues that man must not reflect the divine. He writes:

``There must be a thorough compliance with divine principles, but
without
any manifestations thereof. All can be summed up in one word--passivity.
For
the perfect man employs his mind as a mirror--it grasps nothing, it
refuses
nothing; it receives, but does not retain.''

Also, the mind, to Chuang Tze, is incapable of abstract thought, and
cannot
conceive of the infinite: ``The mind cannot picture to itself a thing
without form, nor conceive a form of unlimited dimensions.'' This is
pure
Aristotle, who stated bluntly that ``the infinite considered as such is
unknown''--and that ``the actual infinite does not exist.''

In such a world without jen and without absolutes, issues of right and
wrong
are indeterminate. Chuang Tze argues that: ``Anything is good or evil
because it is either good or evil in our eyes.'' Under this rule of
moral
relativism, he continues: ``there is nothing which is not good, nothing
which is not evil.''

Out of this came Legalism. To understand Legalism, look at Aristotle. To
Aristotle, the Platonic (and Confucian) notion of man as fundamentally
good,
capable by nature of contemplating the infinite and hypothesizing
scientific
principles, was rejected in favor of a view of man as fundamentally
neutral,
with a blank slate, a tabula rasa, for a mind. The mind is capable only
of
recording sense perceptions, and like a computer, making logical
deductions
or inductions from the data. Such a human being, of course, has no
inherent
worth, and therefore can be shaped at will by those who control his or
her
education to anything they so desire--from a loyal bureaucrat, bribed
with
material rewards, to mindless helots, deprived of education and culture
and
condemned to subservient labor or outright slavery, as cogs in a
machine. A
``cog in a machine'' was in fact precisely Mao's description of a
``perfect
communist.''

This description of Aristotle is also a description of the Legalists in
China. Hs'n Tze, the Aristotle of China, in opposition to Mencius,
asserted
that man was not born good, but evil, not guided by jen, by the love
inscribed in their hearts, but by greed and lust. Hs'n Tze's students
formalized a ``philosophy'' based on this degraded concept of man, in
order
to justify the rule of tyrants, above any laws of God. This was
Legalism, a
Hobbesian nightmare. The preferred ideology for the pacification of the
masses was Taoism.

The Legalists came to power for a brief and brutal reign from 221-206
B.C.,
under the Legalist Emperor Qin Shi-huang, who united China through
balance-of-power military operations. Qin banned Confucianism, burned
the
Confucian texts, and buried alive several hundred Confucian scholars who
resisted. Migrant peasants driven off the land much as they are today in
the
PRC, were rounded up into slave brigades to build the Great Wall, where
most
of them died. Being poor was a crime, much as Milton Friedman's minions
consider poverty to be evidence of laziness. The penalty for the crime
of
poverty was slavery for one's entire family.

This Legalist Emperor was the idol of Mao Zedong. As I showed in an
article
called, ``The British Role in the Creation of Maoism,'' these Legalists,
and
the Taoist ideology associated with it, was embraced as the favored
ideology
of the British drug dealers and British scholars in keeping with the
bestial
Social Darwinist view of man espoused by Hobbes, Hume, Bentham, Adam
Smith,
et al. from the stable of philosophical prostitutes for the British East
India Company. The history of the British in China is the history of the
sabotage of Confucianism, and especially of any potential for
Christian/Confucian collaboration such as that espoused by Dr. Sun Yat
Sen,
while glorifying the Legalist and Taoist ideology, including the
creation of
a worldwide Taoist cult.

This Taoist influence can be seen directly today in the school
curriculum
being proposed by the Outcome Based Education movement.

Look again at the population graph (Figure 1).

Upon the death of the Legalist Emperor Qin, the Qin Dynasty was rapidly
overthrown. The new Han Dynasty, which lasted over 400 years to 220
A.D.,
was built on a return to Confucianism, establishing the classics as a
standard for education, scholarship, and the examinations for public
offices. Sustained population growth throughout the Han reflects this
Confucian view of man. By the time of Christ, the Chinese population was
about the same as all of Europe, about 50 million, while the population
density was nearly twice that of Europe.

What happened to bring down the Han, and create an 800-year decline and
stagnation? Without going beyond generalities, the Han failed to solve
the
fundamental economic problems facing the vast empire. A
``counterculture''
emerged, with many scholars looking back to Taoism as the Confucian
structure of government appeared to be breaking down. It was argued that
one
could be a Confucian in regard to social relations and government
policy,
while at the same time a Taoist in regard to spiritual matters. Such an
arrangement removed the actually spiritual basis from Confucianism--the
role
of jen considered as the Word of God--reducing it to a formal code of
conduct, and thus open to corruption--just like the U.S. judicial
system,
once you've removed its original natural law foundation that ``all men
are
created equal with certain inalienable rights,'' has become a vehicle
for
injustice and tyranny.

During this 800-year stagnation, Buddhism was introduced into China from
India along the Silk Route. I don't wish to discuss Buddhism here, but
in
China, the Mahayana form of Buddhism, which taught the idea of ``sudden
enlightenment'' through the denial of any reality in the physical world
and
stopping the process of mentation altogether, interacted with Taoism to
create a Chinese version of Buddhism, Ch'an, or, in Japanese, Zen.
Zen, Taoism, and a greatly corrupted form of Confucianism became known
as
the ``Three Teachings.'' One could practice all three--like the
Fellowship
of Religion. But, of course, like their claim to be trying to bring all
religions together by finding the lowest common denominator among them,
what
you end up with is a bunch of Satanists, defending the ``human rights''
of
monkeys.

The amalgam of these three totally incompatible world views was to
become
known as ``Chinese Philosophy,'' a racist idea that somehow there is a
single unified way of thought which restricts the thinking of all Asians
or
all Chinese. Of course, in China, the British refer to ``Western
Philosophy,'' by which they mean British gnostic empiricism. That is not
to
say that there are not common and unique cultural influences to the
Chinese
as distinct from other cultures, but these are ideological questions.
Philosophically, one can trace the same philosophical divisions in both
East
and West.

In the West, you have on the one side, the Platonists and the Christian
Platonists, who believe that the world is governed by a single power
which
is good and is intelligible to man due to his creative reason; and, on
the
other hand, the Aristotelian, gnostic ideology of oligarchs and their
minions, who argue that man is governed by his animal instincts, and
can, at
best, submit to a pragmatic ordering of a Godless society based on
codified
punishments and rewards. This same division, with similar predicates,
exists
in China in the worldviews of Confucianism, as opposed to
Taoism/Legalism,
and Zen Buddhism.

Every swing in this extremely volatile population graph for China can be
explained by the shifting influence of one or the other of these world
views
over Chinese society--leaps forward during periods of Confucian revival,
collapse during resurgence of Taoist degeneracy. The subject of my paper
in
the summer issue of Fidelio is the Great Confucian Renaissance of the
eleventh and twelfth century Sung Dynasty, led by Chu Hsi, which
generated
the doubling of the population between 1000 and 1200 A.D. The influence
of
Taoism and Zen generally collapsed. A technological revolution was
generated
by the intellectual climate and method. The discovery of paper and
printing
made China the first nation where mass production and distribution of
books
transformed society. Most of these early printed books were either the
Classics and commentaries by the leaders of the Confucian Renaissance,
or
books on agricultural technology, including seed varieties, hydraulics
and
irrigation, etc., which created a massive increase in production,
facilitating the population growth.

The devastating collapse in the thirteenth century is the result of the
Mongol invasion, which brought back Taoism along with the plague.

The dramatic recovery after the fall of the Mongols, during the early
Ming
Dynasty, represents a revival of the Confucian Renaissance of the Sung.
Chu
Hsi's work became the standard for education and the examinations, and
Great
Projects were launched, including the great voyages into the Middle East
and
Africa, with armadas of the largest ships in the world to that time. The
population again doubled between 1400 and 1600.

However, for reasons I do not believe are adequately understood to
history,
in 1435, virtually the same time that the European Renaissance was being
launched by Nicolaus of Cusa at the Council of Florence, the Ming
Dynasty
abruptly turned inward, canceling all voyages and even destroying many
of
the ships. The failure of will and vision at that time led to a steady
deterioration of the Confucian moral structure of society. A new form of
the
``Three Teachings'' emerged, which lasts up to today; this time through
grafting of Zen Buddhist and Taoist ideas onto a pseudo-Confucianism by
a
fellow named Wang Yang-Ming. Again society degenerated, and the
population
collapsed between 1600 and 1644, when the Manchurians were able to sweep
down on Beijing and rapidly take over all of China.

However, the Jesuits had arrived in the late sixteenth century, and by
the
time of the fall of the Ming, in 1644, they had been given leadership of
several ministries in the court, including astronomy, hydraulics, and
others. The invading Manchu were quickly convinced to retain the Jesuits
in
the court, and the child destined to be the great Emperor Kang Hsi
(1661-1725), was given an extraordinary education in European
Renaissance
science, art, and theology by the Jesuits personally, while at the same
time, he received thorough instruction in the Confucian classics.
Kang Hsi became a dedicated follower of Chu Hsi, the Sung leader of the
Confucian Renaissance, as well as a sponsor of Christianity. It was
during
his reign that Leibniz carried on his correspondence with the Jesuits,
and
launched his plans for the Grand Design--the economic development of the
entire Eurasian landmass, linking Europe and China in such a way that,
as he
said, ``as these most cultivated and distant peoples stretch out their
arms
to each other, those in between may gradually be brought to a better way
of
life.''

You can see by the graph, the tremendous explosion in population after
1650,
more than tripling over the next 200 years. This is the dramatic proof
of
the power of the ecumenical alliance between Confucianism and
Christianity,
the shared belief that man is created in the living image of God. No
other
Asian nation experienced this population explosion--Japan's population
declined over the eighteenth century, while India's grew by less than 10
percent. China's more than doubled. China literally ``joined'' the
population explosion in Europe that had begun with the Italian
Renaissance
in the fifteenth century.

The Christian/Confucian alliance did not last 200 years, however. The
same
Enlightenment forces used by Venice and London to destroy the
Renaissance in
Europe succeeded in cutting off Western support for the brilliant work
of
Leibniz and the missionary/scientists in China. By the death of Kang Hsi
in
1725, the connection was broken--the potential for the Christianization
of
China was destroyed. Europe increasingly fell under British masonic
control,
while in China, although the impulse of the Confucian/Christian period
sustained relative peace and prosperity throughout the eighteenth
century,
as shown by the population graph, still, the cutoff of scientific input
from
the Golden Renaissance and stagnation in the Chinese leadership over the
next 100 years left China vulnerable to British gunboats when they
arrived
in 1840.

The collapse of population after 1850, which you see in the graph,
represents the fruits of the British Opium Wars and their sponsorship of
a
peasant revolt called the Taiping Rebellion, which claimed to be a
pseudo-Christian movement, but was actually a Taoist atrocity supported
by
British and American missionaries and government officials. The Taiping
Rebellion was used to force Beijing to capitulate to Lord Palmerston's
demands to the right to ``free trade,'' meaning the free sale of British
opium throughout the empire. Between 1850 and 1950, under increasing
British
control over every aspect of China's economy and government, the
population
increased by only 25 percent, while the world population increased by
over
100 percent.

The graph of population under the Communists shows that the Chinese
under
Taoist leadership are still able to commit genocide without outside
help.
The drastic dip was the Great Leap Forward where 30 to 50 million died.
The
decreasing rate of growth since the Cultural Revolution is paradigmatic
of
an impending collapse.

I want to review only one aspect of the material in the Fidelio article.
That one aspect is what I called the extension of the thesis in ``On the
Peace of Faith'' by Nicolaus of Cusa. Cusanus posed that the Christian
Trinity of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, as
revealed
through the life of Christ, was also a scientific truth which is
imbedded in
the laws of the universe. Therefore, he argued, anyone, following any
theology which believes that the universe is governed by one principle,
that
it is not irrational and inconsistent, must necessarily discover this
triune
reality in the process of investigating the lawfulness of the creation.
While Cusanus was not familiar with Confucianism, he demonstrated in
``On
the Peace of the Faith'' that every religion could be shown to reflect
the
truth of the Trinity understood in this way. I will show how this
concept
can be extended to include Confucianism, following the work of both
Cusanus
and Leibniz.

To demonstrate this, let me review the fundamental ideas developed by
Chu
Hsi and his predecessors in the eleventh and twelfth century, the Sung
Dynasty.

Chu Hsi wrote an essay called ``Treatise on Jen.'' He argued that since
the
death of Mencius, the true meaning of jen--and, in fact, the true
meaning of
the entire Confucian doctrine--had been generally lost. Jen had come to
mean, at best, love in a more general sense, encompassing sentimental
notions, an ``inferior and crude concept.'' Chu Hsi wrote that ``When
one
realizes that jen is the source of love, and that love can never exhaust
jen, then one has gained a definite comprehension of jen.'' Further, he
said, ``the mind of Heaven to produce things is jen. In man's endowment,
he
receives this mind from Heaven, and thus he can produce.''

You can see that this is very similar to the idea of the Word of God,
the
Holy Spirit, which emanates from God, pervades and animates the
universe,
and is the basis of man's ability to participate in the unfolding
creation
of the universe.

This led Chu Hsi to recognize the need to develop a metaphysical
explanation
of the relationship between God and man. Neither Confucius nor Mencius
had
engaged in extensive metaphysical speculation, having the unfortunate
consequence that Taoist and Zen Buddhist notions of Nothingness,
mystical
means of longevity, reincarnation, and so forth, tended to fill the void
for
people searching for such answers. Chu Hsi addressed this head on, by
taking
several notions used by Taoists and Zen Buddhists, explicating a true
metaphysical understanding of these concepts which was coherent with the
concept of jen discussed above, and in the process, carried out a fierce
and
devastating polemic against both Taoism and Zen Buddhism.

The term Tao itself is an example. By exposing the Taoist notion of the
Tao
as a falsely constructed limit on man's capacity to know anything, as
something lying beyond an unbridgeable gap from man's intelligibility,
he
returned to the notion of the Tao, the true path, or God, as used by
Confucius. Chu Hsi showed that one can learn more and more about the
Tao,
about God, in an unlimited way, bounded only by the absolute infinite of
God
himself. This knowledge comes about through man's capacity to
contemplate
the infinite, and thus we can know the Tao negatively. For example, Chu
Hsi
says: ``The Tao alone has no opposite.'' Also: ``God is not spatially
conditioned. He has neither corporeal form nor body. There is no spot
where
He can be placed.'' But man can, through the intellect, conceive of the
negation of these finite limitations, to thus conceptualize the infinite
attributes of Tao. This concept is very similar in nature to the method
used
by St. Thomas Aquinas, nearly a contemporary of Chu Hsi, to refute the
materialist, finite epistemology of Aristotle, and anticipates the work
of
Nicolaus of Cusa two centuries later in his work on negative theology,
as
you'll find in the work of Will Wertz on Aquinas and Cusanus.

The most important contribution of Chu Hsi was the concept of Li,
usually
translated as Principle, which was a term only occasionally used by
Confucius and Mencius, and misused by the Taoists. Chu Hsi defined Li as
``complete wholeness,'' as ``above the realm of corporeality,'' and as
``prior to all created things.'' This is God, pure Unity, the One. But,
he
says:

``Li is one, but its manifestations are many.... There is only one Li,
but
as applied to man, there is in each individual a particular Li.''

Thus, the Li is both the one and the many, in the sense that every
created
thing reflects the lawfulness of the creation, that this reflection of
the
creator is the Principle of that created thing, or its Li, which
participates in the Universal Li, which is God the Creator.

Leibniz said
of
Li:

``Can we not say that the Li of the Chinese is the sovereign substance
which
we revere under the name of God?''
He saw that the individual manifestation of Li in all things was similar
to
his notion of the monad; in fact, his development of this concept
reflected
his intense, life-long study of Confucianism and Chu Hsi in particular.
This is also crucial to scientific method. Unlike the pseudo-science of
the
Taoists, the Aristotelians, the British empiricists in general, one
cannot
learn anything truthful or truly useful about the universe by simply
observing and recording the accidental attributes of the material form
or
structure of things. One must hypothesize the causal relations between
things and events in the universe, on how things change, how they are
changed by other things or events, and how they cause change in other things.

When things or events are not understood, or contradict existing
accepted
notions about the universe, then a hypothesis must be formulated and
tested
through a crucial experiment which challenges existing knowledge with a
higher conception.

The clue necessary for a successful hypothesis is what Leibniz called
the
law of necessary and sufficient reason. The law of necessary and
sufficient
reason stated in somewhat Confucian terms, is that the principle of any
thing or event, its Li, is coherent with and participates in God's
creation
as a whole, and thus must be perfect, or participate in God's
perfection, in
the sense that it has precisely those qualities necessary for it to be
and
to act as it does, and it has no important extraneous qualities, other
than
those sufficient to be and to act as it does. It is in this sense that
Leibniz says that this world was created by God as the best of all
possible
worlds. It is the comprehension of this truth which provides the only
possible basis for the kind of thinking necessary for true scientific
work;
it is the basis upon which hypothecation can be made.

It is not surprising then, that among empiricist scientists of the
twentieth
century who have been instrumental in destroying the scientific method
of
hypothesis practiced by Kepler, Leibniz, and Riemann, we find several
who
are raving Taoists. Not only Joseph Needham, who I single out for attack
in
the Fidelio article, but also Niels Bohr, the founder of quantum
mechanics.
Bohr credited Taoism as the inspiration for his world view. His theory
of
``complementarity'' derived from the Taoist yin-yang view of the
universe.
To such Taoists, no doubt, cold fusion is neither yin nor yang, and
therefore simply doesn't exist. I promise you more on this in the
future.

To conclude, we can now look at how the Trinity is imbedded in
Confucianism.
Nicolaus of Cusa identified the Trinity as Unity, Equality and
Connection.
The Unity is the One and the Many coexisting in the Creator, God the
creator
of all things. To Christians, this is God the Father; to Confucians, the
indivisible Universal Li, or Tao.

The Equality, the second person of the Trinity is the reflection of the
Creator in every creating thing and event, which is reflected in the
most
perfected way in man, in the divine spark of reason. To Christians,
Christ
represents true Equality with God, while through the imitation of Christ
all
men can share in that equality. To Confucians, this is the individual
Li, or
individual Principle in all things and events, which is intelligible to
man
due to the ``inborn luminous virtue'' that Heaven has bestowed on all
mankind.

And, finally, the Connection, the third person of the Trinity, is the
love,
which emanates from the Unity and from all his creations, insofar as his
creations manifest the Creator. This love that connects all things is
the
Christian agapė, the Holy Spirit that proceeds from the Father and from
the
Son. It is, to Confucius, jen, the boundless love of Heaven and Earth.

Just as the Trinity is an indivisible unity for Christianity, so is the
triune nature of nature itself an indivisible unity, and so also are the
Tao, Li and jen an indivisible unity to Confucianism.

Compare this concept of Unity, Equality and Connection, to the Taoist
``all-is-one,'' which is the root of virtually every environmental cult
today. To them, it is not the singular transfinite essence, or Li, of
things
which characterize equality with the Creator and his creations, but the
material things themselves, the ephemeral, accidental attributes of
things,
are all One. The world is One, undifferentiated. There is no distinction
between God, man, animal and rock. Thus, a spotted owl or a gorilla have
the
same worth and the same rights as a human being. In such a world, there
is
no living God, but the world is just a self-moving entity, plodding
through
time without any higher law or guidance, reduced to the mindless,
bestial
world of the discredited Darwinian foolishness, the rule of greed and
lust.

Can China turn away from its current course, heading for yet another
catastrophic collapse of population, and instead contribute to a new
Renaissance for all mankind? Confucius, Mencius, and Chu Hsi live in the
hearts of the Chinese people. Although Mao forcefully eliminated all
teaching of the classics, burned the books and murdered the scholars
just as
his mentor Qin Shi-huang had done, still, the tradition is passed on,
however imperfectly, from parent to child.

Most likely, the Chinese in the audience there today learned some of
this
from their parents or grandparents. The tradition is preserved, but
endangered, in Taiwan, where, as in the West, there are very few who do
not
compromise with the Taoist/Aristotelian ideology. Our own role in
renewing
the ecumenical method and the Grand Design of Leibniz is indispensable.